Advertisement
Published: March 29th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Bags of fun!
Over two weeks I put up over 5000 of these bags, became an expert and will be willing to give demonstrations when I get home! Briefly, last time we wrote this we were just off to work - more fruit picking again. So we spent 2 weeks in Innisfail, picking bananas. The work was ok, although it did involve far too many spiders (which scare me senseless!), lots of snakes (which I quite like!) and a few frogs (which i'm quite indifferent to!). The hostel in Innisfail was horrendous, so we only stayed for two weeks before taking our paychecks and fleeing to Cairns, where we now sit writing this.
Now after the slight monotony of Australia's east coast (all the small towns are identical!), it was quite a relief to arrive in busy, touristy Cairns. It is a fab city, where every other shop is a souvineer shop, the rest are pubs and cafes! You can see why I like it - food, wine and tack all along one street! It has a beautiful salt-water lagoon on the esplanade, which is just heaven on a hot day - of which there are many, as the average temperature has been about 38 degrees while we've been here. It's surrounded by mountains so the view from any part of the city is pretty spectacular.
Us
With the reef in the background, honest! Now we've been in Cairns for the last five days, in which time we've learnt to dive. Yes, both myself and Jonny are now qualified PADI open water divers! A slightly strange skill to have, not entirely sure that it's one for the CV when we finally return to the real world! However there is apparently a dive club in Newhaven, so if ever we fancy a spot of hypothermia i'm sure we'll jump on into the channel!
Learning to dive was probably one of the most challenging things that i've done but also one of the easiest to learn. Now i know that this doesn't make sense but i can't really explain it, but i'll try....None of the things that you have to do are particularly difficult, for example taking out your regulator (which you breathe through), but when you are 16 metres under water this suddenly becomes far more of a challenge!
We spent the first two days in a classroom learning the theory behind diving and also in a swimming pool learning how to breathe underwater and how to do various skills that i hope i'll never have to use, for example, what to do
Atherton Tablelands
The mountains around Cairns. Beautiful! if you run out of air 12m below the surface! After we had passed various tests (in which i beat Jonny on more than one occasion!) we were unleashed onto the reef. By this i'm referring to the Great Barrier Reef, and not the alcopop that's popular with underage drinkers!
The last two days of the course were spent diving on the Great Barrier Reef and putting all of our new found skills into practice. We saw lots of cool fish, Nemo who lives in a pink anenome (very camp!) and is actually a transsexual (disney left that fact out for some reason!). Stingrays, parrot fish, cleaner fish (a small fish kindly eats all of the bigger fish's parasites-nice!). Oh, and I also saw a shark. A black tipped reef shark to be precise, he was about 1.5 metres long, so actually quite small in shark terms!
From the way this is written it sounds like it was all plain sailing (he he he), however it wasn't all as easy as it sounds, well not for me anyway. Jonny took to it like a duck to water and managed to make it all look so easy. I , however found it all a bit more difficult mainly due to problems with my ears.
As a child i suffered with numerous ear complaints which i then grew out of, so obviously i thought it would be a good idea to create some new problems!
Basically the problem is this - When you dive you have to equalise the pressure that the water creates on the ears, this is done by popping them - it all sounds so simple and it is for most people. I however am unique.
During my pre-dive medical the doctor showed me lots of different ways to make my ears pop - i had to do a combination of all of these at the same time whilst descending. All in all it gave the impression that i was performing some sort of tribal dance which increased in intensity the further underwater i got! Once again i manage to make a 'cool' sport so incredibly ridiculous! (Did you see my surfing picture's - very cool but for the cheesy grin!) As i said, i'm unique!
After all of this, a slightly crazy dive-master decided that we were competant to go off and dive without somone to look after us. Truely scary, but sooo much fun! For some reason i put my faith in Jonny to navigate us around 10 metres below the surface, it was only after we surfaced that he confessed that he was actually 'disorientated' (read 'lost')! But after no great dramas we are now back on dry land, planning what to do next...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.107s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0875s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Linda Palmer otherwiseknown as Mum
non-member comment
The little green monster
Hi Bob Just been looking at the photos on your latest blog. In the one where you're putting bags on the banana tree (why?????) it looks as though you've got a little octopussy green monster in your pocket . Or are you just glad to see someone? luv Linda